The drought in new logistics-industry public stock offerings may be ending. Schneider National Inc. plans to go public next year, bringing the largest privately-held trucking company in the U.S. by revenue to investors. Schneider’s planned initial public offering follows a filing by Chinese logistics provider ZTO Express Co. to go public, and the WSJ reports it would mark the first major IPO in more than six years in the freight and logistics arena. Since then, big operators companies such as Coyote Logistics and Genco have been acquired, smaller companies have gone to private equity for funds and several big operators including Con-way Inc. and Pacer International have left the publicly-traded rolls. Schneider is announcing its IPO in a tepid freight market, but the company may have the weight with investors to transcend the current conditions. With some $3.4 billion in trucking revenue last year, according to SJ Consulting Group, it’s the seventh-largest trucking company in the U.S. and has significant operations in logistics and intermodal truck-to-rail transport.

The long slump in commodity prices is pushing commodity-exporting countries to reshape their economies. The new national strategies are part of a broad restructuring of distribution channels taking place around the world as prices for many staples sink, currency values decline and imports get more expensive. The WSJ’s David Harrison reports that in Latin America, the adjustment has meant more attention on things like infrastructure and making and easing regulations to attract business. Peru is among the countries spending more on infrastructure as part of what Finance Minister Alfredo Thorne says is a bid to wean the economy off its reliance on copper exports. And Paraguay is trying to increase its value-added exports, rather than relying solely on agricultural products like soybeans. The changes to bedrock economic policies are so significant that the deeper changes to supply chains may outlast any recovery in commodity markets.

The clouds over
Samsung Electronics Co.’s
smartphone supply chain are growing darker. The South Korean technology giant’s decision to halt production of its supposedly-safe Galaxy Note 7 replacements raises doubts about the initial assertion that pinned blame for fires in the phones on one battery supplier. The WSJ’s Jonathan Cheng and Eun-Young Jeong report that just more than a month after announcing a global recall of 2.5 million smartphones, Samsung now says it is “temporarily adjusting the Galaxy Note 7 production schedule in order to take further steps to ensure quality and safety matters.” Experts say the production and supply-chain problems may go deeper since the phone’s problems may not be the battery itself but the battery’s voltage control system and low-quality materials that go inside a battery cell. For now, Samsung has switched the sourcing of its batteries to a different supplier. But the urgency of the company’s replacement effort may put new stresses on the new supplier to speed up production—and new tensions and quality concerns in the supply chain.

TRANSPORTATION

Photo:
Kris Maz

India is trying to reshape its economic prospects by redrawing its railroad maps. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi
plans to pour some $130 billion over the next five years into an effort to overhaul the country’s sprawling and famously rickety rail system, the WSJ’s Raymond Zhong reports. That’s more than double what the country spent over the last decade across the thousands of miles of tracks that carry passengers and freight, mostly on the same crowded and crumbling lines. Freight traffic has more than doubled over the past two decades while total route length has grown just 5%. Cargo trains limp along at 15 miles an hour on average, yet India charges some of the world’s highest cargo rates so that it can keep passenger fares low. That ends up pushing more goods to the country’s clogged and unsafe roads. The aging rail infrastructure is a barrier to India’s hopes of a greater profile in international trade, and moving goods more efficiently on the tracks may bring more foreign investment—and provide more backing for even more investment in infrastructure.